Quick follow-up ideas...
I've gotten a handful of PM's asking me how would you even go about creating an ETF-type product like what Secondmarkets want to do with BitCoin? While creating these products is not really my side of the investment business (I'm on the investors' side rather than the product-creation side if that makes sense), this fact sheet from Secondmarkets (
http://www.bitcointrust.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Fact-Sheet_April.pdf) shows some basic entities you would need, such as:
-Sponsoring company (which may very well be completely independent of the developers)
-Independent Auditor
-Legal Counsel to the Sponsor (and I have actually heard that this one Secondmarkets has here, Sidley Austin LLP, is pretty damn good at currency and commodity-linked indexes, which is likely what form of ETF any potential Blackcoin ETF would take)
-Stock Transfer Agent
-Delaware Statutory Trustee
-Someone to act as a primary distributor
And I'm sure there are more entities involved.
Anyhow, I don't entirely think Iconic's idea is bad I just think it's mis-placed and will be all for naught with what will be ordinary touristy people who happen to be visiting Wall Street.
Now, I saw this genius MIT plan with Bitcoin today (
http://bitcoin.mit.edu/announcing-the-mit-bitcoin-project/) ...now THAT is a place (ie a large, well-known college campus) where Iconic's plan would be marvelous. I think this MIT/BTC plan is the perfect target for this kind of plan because for the most part they're a very tech-savvy target and they're young and the target is likely tech-savvy guys and what college guy wouldn't take a Blackcoin Card from a pretty face?
But furthermore, what college students use cash? None. Nearly all use credit cards these days already pre-loaded with fundage from mom and dad. I'd speculate that these MIT students mainly use this BTC to payback each other for various things (cable bill, utility bill, payback for the 6 beers last night, etc) and I'm going to guess that the ending result from this large experiment will be that BTC's slow transaction times will keep students from using it to pay for other things (books, groceries, etc).
Now enter Blackcoin though, I could see an experiment like this with Blackcoin having hugely massive success due in part to ridiculously fast transaction times.
What if Blackcoin completely emulated this experiment and gave out pre-loaded cards to students at like Stanford or some other highly visible but tech-savvy university in the same fashion Iconic is calling for? Or perhaps we balls-up and do it at MIT? Compete with BTC at the transaction-level in a highly-visible competition of sorts.
JL